slinging words at the internet since 2016

Has the Premier League gone too far?

Yes, it was fun for a while.

We enjoyed the soap opera and it all seemed harmless enough. But what about the effect on the minds (and maybe even the genes) of our screen-hungry kids here in the UK?

They have soaked up every extreme of morally dubious behaviour, from racism to sexual predation. They have watched grown men normalise cheating and poor sportsmanship. They have developed an addiction to shouty salesmanship on Sky Sports, and show signs of a tolerance for increasing monthly subscription fees.

They are customers of the future, and they are desensitised to the absurdity of it all.

We are cultivating a generation whose instinctive human response to having a ball kicked at their shins is to flail around on the ground holding their face, and who think the minimum wage is somewhere around £20,000 per week.

Many, even in their early teens, are suffering anxiety about securing the best commercial deal for their image rights.

I fear they are literally evolving to thrive in the glow of this televised Premier League bubble. In time, they’ll produce perfectly adapted offspring who will naturally find themselves diving, jostling referees, and buying matt black Range Rovers.

I’m fairly sure this is what Charles Darwin was getting at all those years ago when he invented evolution.

But there’ll be a tipping point.

Perhaps we’ve reached it already?

Luis Suarez had bitten his latest victim, John Terry had racially abused a fellow player, Adam Johnson had been jailed for sexual offences, and the nation agreed with a chuckle the Premier League is a moral vacuum and carried on watching regardless.

Leading humanity down an evolutionary dead-end, populated by freakish athletes with haircuts visiting strip clubs.